The deceptively simple resolution of this space has delivered a plaza that is exceptional across multiple levels, both literally and functionally. Movement, accessibility and visual connections have been significantly improved and advantage taken of the dramatic topography and spectacular views. The Hub and Plaza work well as a space aligned to students’ needs and other daily activities of the university but also provide a lively and flexible terraced amphitheatre for more broader community, sporting and artistic events, during daylight hours and at night. The jury was impressed by the way the site planning, derived from the site’s inherent qualities and functionality, allows the space to speak for itself, unencumbered by superfluous ornamentation.
The finished Hub and Plaza provide an impressive ‘front door’ to the University, capturing its aspirations for an inspiring environment for learning in a contemporary setting.
Oxigen is to be congratulated for its insight and leading role in both the design and management to achieve this highly successful, major reworking of the Flinders University Campus Hub.

Client: Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Planning, Transport and Infrastructure

The Anzac Centenary Memorial Walk is a strong underlining of the importance of public commemoration and a bold embellishment to the city’s public realm. Tract Consultant’s contemporary design incorporates the idea of memory and the sacred, honouring the sacrifice and service of Australia’s service men and women. The prominent terrace reveals an urban vista from river to city presenting a succession of conflicts remembered through time. The design of the processional space complements the surrounding heritage architecture and provides a transition from the business of the city. Linking the cultural boulevard of North Terrace between War Memorial and Torrens Parade Ground, it opens a new transect across Government House, enclosed within a regiment of new garden beds and trees. The seemingly simple integration within the existing space has created new opportunities for interpretation of Australia’s role in historic events and their symbolism in lasting memories to those who have served.

Precinct / Area: Adelaide SA

Civic Landscape - Landscape Architecture Award: Rundle Mall

Entrant Practice: HASSELL

Client: Adelaide City Council - City Design and Transport

The revitalised Rundle Mall heralds an exciting and active space for people. Hassell’s design delivers a destination beyond the purely transactional toward the experience of communal gathering and social engagement. The inclusion of supporting infrastructure for adaptable, flexible spaces and an overarching openness and flow to the elements, creates opportunities for people to define new events. The bespoke furnishings are delightful forms, ergonomic platforms for sitting, lying, leaning, for people to gather and linger. The arrangement and patterning throughout is amorphous, subtly shifting the regimented geometry of the mall. Openings and intersections are defined by their openness, allowed to fill with the weave of pedestrians. Similarly the canopy structure is open elevated high above, open to views and light. The tree canopy will reinforce an open lightness of delicate green tracery interspersed and aligned between historic architecture. The success of the collaboration with the Council and in particular, the retail community is manifest in the quality of this achievement, a vitally important enhancement and reimagining of the city’s premier retail precinct.

Adelaide prides itself on its squares and parklands which provide opportunities for a diverse range of recreational activities. Within the city, however, there are few small, easily accessible public spaces associated with the growing number of residential apartments. As Adelaide strives towards building a vibrant inner city with higher residential densities and high rise development with minimal private open space, immediate access to high quality public open space is imperative. This is especially important as Australia’s population ages.
The Tract team, in partnership with client Adelaide City Council and Hindmarsh Construction, have set a high bar in delivering the Ergo Apartments precinct. The north/south pedestrian and cycle thoroughfare reinstates the formerly alienated street, creating accessibility and connectivity to surrounding areas. The public and private domains become more than the sum of the parts by careful handling of the interface between them. Seating, public art and elevated lawns enhance opportunities for social engagement. Equally important but less visible, technical and ownership issues have been innovatively resolved to ensure clarity of liability and maintenance responsibilities.
Tract Consultants are to be congratulated, in collaboration with the client, other consultants and the contractor, for setting a notable precedent for similar city developments.

Parks and Open Space Award

Precinct / Area: Henley Beach, SA

Parks and Open Space Award of Excellence: Henley Square

Entrant Practice: City of Charles Sturt and TCL/Troppo

Client: City of Charles Sturt

This significant project – winner of a national design competition – has revived an important coastal location. The closest beach to Adelaide’s CBD, Henley Square is a major attraction and features the jetty, a variety of eateries and the Surf Life Saving Club as well as a broad beach. TCL and Troppo’s new extended Square provides distinctive new facilities, drawing people into the central space and through to the beach and jetty beyond. The ephemeral water feature on the upper terrace is much enjoyed by children in warm weather, flanked by high timber shade structures, with a long ripple lounge providing permanent public seating between wide lawns and leading to the lower promenade. To the west a further unique barbeque shelter, below a cleverly fitted toilet block, provides a shady lookout point above new whimsical showers. CCS and TCL’s extensive consultation with a diverse range of stakeholders sought to engage a strong local community and the impressive result has enlivened a historically vibrant area with new life.

In this dynamic arena of current landscape focus, WAX Design has continued to expand their portfolio of carefully-considered unique play spaces. Foreshore playgrounds provide special challenges and opportunities. As a theme, the waves and dunes offer formal inspiration. The ‘artificial’ stimulus of a giant sand castle and abstracted coloured beach towel dome, mix with elements drawn from indigenous vegetation including the roots of mangroves and intertidal water play. The site has allowed for a gradation of challenges throughout, for all ages and abilities, encouraging confident play and exploration. Early community engagement with the development of the project included children in a Family Fun Day as well as online input. The project has experimented too with ‘Living Soft Fall Turf’ as an organic alternative to artificial turf. This is another site-specific success, evident in the constant use of this special play space.

Public open space facilities for youth are a challenging and often overlooked community necessity. This site has been decisively transformed, not just by inclusion of a particular element, but with a rich mix of youth-based activities including BMX, skating, parkour, and basketball in addition to toilets, nifty ‘traffic light’ seating pods and integrated landscape elements. This area is adjacent and linked to a network of wetland trails and picnic facilities and expands the overall open space attractions of the precinct. It also intertwines opportunities to engage with indigenous flora and fauna incorporating several mature trees carefully into the youth spaces, as well as appreciating the importance of Kaurna cultural links in the graphic form of a shield, and monitoring the site carefully during construction excavations. The strongly activated site has been enhanced by programs over the summer after completion with the aim of ongoing mentorship, support and youth leadership conceived by the City of Marion and Outerspace as part of the outcome of the project.

This innovative assessment tool, that evaluates the existing landscape character and the degree of visual change that will be produced by the proposed infrastructure, is not only important to wind farms but other urban infrastructure such as monopole communication towers. This is an expanding area of expertise where the skills of the Landscape Architect can be employed to demonstrate the potential visual effect on landscape and community.
The innovation that BGLA and WAX Design have developed for this tool is the Grimke assessment matrix that considers key attributes of the existing landscape such as relief, vegetation, built form, and infrastructure; as well as community and cultural landscape values. These attributes are rated to produce a landscape character assessment value. This provides a baseline measurement for the existing landscape from which a degree of visual change can be calculated, which considers the extent to which the proposed development will alter the existing landscape character.

This process has the ability to demonstrate the effects of major infrastructure and potential solutions to these strong visual interventions into the rural or urban landscape.

This exciting space created by Taylor Cullity Lethlean Consultants challenges the usual thinking about the quality of the airport experience. What better way to welcome both new arrivals and home comers than by offering such a refreshingly different threshold to the airport. For the first time visitor the organically designed plaza, referencing the shapes and colours of the south Australian landscape and climate, and free of the usual clutter of vehicular traffic, is a major point of difference that also presages the possibility of otherness and creativity in the experiences to be had in Adelaide and South Australia. The ‘Watercourse’ feature, designed in collaboration with sculptor Mark Stoner, provides a playful intervention into the hardscape of the plaza, mimicking the patterns of creeks that lace through the often parched South Australian landscape. The high quality detailing of the paving, the steel seating and vehicular zone screens are also to be commended.

The Jury was unanimous in its view that this major gateway to Adelaide and South Australia, providing a highly memorable and refreshing experience for travellers, is deserving of the Award of Excellence.

In recent years there has been a gradual rediscovery of the inestimable value of play through engagement with nature. The construction of the Nature’s Playground exhibit at the Adelaide Zoo capitalises on the zoo’s context to enable children of all ages, genders, cultures and abilities to learn through play and gain knowledge from nature. This new playspace, based on the planet’s major biomes, allows the Zoo to expand teaching programmes and foster an understanding of the natural world. A variety of investigative and sensory interventions, such as the rock lined creek, are balanced by opportunities for challenging and risk-taking play within a safe environment. The elevated wheelchair walkway, accessible both by lift and ramp, provides alternative views as well as additional, unique and exciting play opportunities.
The unprecedented increase in Adelaide Zoo membership and visitation following completion of this exciting playspace by Wax Design demonstrates the power of landscape architecture to deliver benefits to the state’s economy, initially through tourism and the dollars it generates but, more importantly, to those children whose futures will be positively influenced by this experience.

Client: South Australian Government Department of Planning, Transport and Infrastructure (DPTI)

The transformation of the Riverbank – and beyond – by the Pedestrian Precinct Bridge is a powerful urban design gesture, and the first major work delivered for the Riverbank Masterplan. It has changed the way Adelaide and its visitors see the Torrens, the oval, the Festival Centre and the city. As is typical with TCL projects, a collaborative team including TZG Architects, Aurecon, Karl Telfer and Geoff Cobham, have worked hard to produce an insertion that would address extremely difficult constraints of two sites, clients and stakeholders in a high-profile and highly visible project.
The bridge itself is a new experience and setting for activities, arcing elegantly across the water, its bulk sheathed in reflected daylight and night-time luminance. The landing points provided new opportunities to integrate civic spaces through plazas, gardens and meeting places, the north with the added drama of a waterwall falling from the arc-tip belvedere.
TCL and team have achieved a graceful, integrated outcome with the bridge and its landing points providing effective staging for a range of individual and crowd occupations day and night.

The Unley Central masterplan is a comprehensive, clear and accessible document which represents a cross-disciplinary achievement focused decisively on local community benefits. Since its endorsement in 2014, this clarity has enabled Council to move forward with projects seen as part of a bigger strategic picture of improvement, and leverage funding and state government partnership.
Developed from six guiding principles, the plan led by TCL and team linked policy considerations with technical ones and economic outcomes, all under the driving objective of improving social conditions. In keeping with the visual accessibility of the document, TCL had also suggested a governance model for delivery, with a non-hierarchical forum for discussion of development involving Council as an equal stakeholder with others.
The compelling graphic design and quality of diagrams, images and mapping, communicate the specific character of Unley’s valued heritage, while making a persuasive case for vibrant future developments embracing new transport, infrastructure and sense of community identity.

The Adelaide Design Manual, developed by Design + Strategy, Adelaide City Council is a welcomed new toolkit addition for guiding the implementation of best practice landscape design and urban design standards for the public realm of the City of Adelaide’s streets, public spaces and Park Lands. The Manual has been delivered in the form of a Council-endorsed strategic and technical document which includes a complementary interactive website. The document is primarily aimed at Council staff, Government Departments, designers, developers and to engage with the boarder community. This document can be seen as a template for State and Local government for the public realm.
The creation of a dedicated website for The Adelaide Design Manual with its illustrations and visualisation tools allows the Manual to become approachable and informative to all users. The innovative online format allows The Manual to be updated on a continual basis, providing case studies, guiding documents and technical specifications.
This is a welcome document for the ever increasing demands and pressures on the city public realm especially with the changing climate and its implications.

The legitimacy of the River and Coastal Communities Urban Design Framework and Master Plan is derived from the level of engagement with the communities. Over a scattering of diverse and distinctive settlements the design team became immersed in the physical and cultural landscape. Drawing from intensive community consultation, Outerspace Landscape Architects effectively led the translation of community aspiration into a design language directly informed by and created with the communities. The effective communication by the design team created community confidence and trust in the design process, producing a clear and effective document. The design concepts are sympathetic to the context and at a practical scale for realistic implementation. Encapsulating a vision that is understood and shared by the communities ensures that the document remains an important touchstone in the guidance of development and ensures the sustainability of both Council and community group initiatives.

Precinct / Area: Paradise SA

Communities Landscape Architecture Award: Resthaven Paradise

Entrant Practice: DesignWELL Landscape Architects

Client:Resthaven Incorporated

DesignWELL’s considered approach is informed by extensive research. The collaborative design process has ensured the best quality of life outcomes for residents of Resthaven Paradise. The suite of gardens provides residents with stimulating environments, creating theatres for engagement with nature and community. The gardens sensitively introduce familiar patterns of suburban landscapes into an institutional setting of aged care. The diversity of this community is accommodated in a range of programs and levels of assistance, whereby the gardens play a central role in the community’s wellbeing; creating complete sensory experiences of natural environments; encouraging residents to play an active role in social engagement through gardening and other activities; and allowing children and pets to visit. The gardens of Resthaven Paradise are a successful and exciting demonstration of therapeutic healthcare design and a commitment to the creation of quality environments for quality care for our deserving aged communities.

JPE Design Studio has admirably demonstrated the importance of quality designed play space to support children’s development and learning; a play experience in connection with nature. The design process is an excellent example of community engagement, and in particular with the end-users, the children of the pre-schools. An inclusive and collaborative process has ensured that the children’s ideas were primary in the formation of concepts, as evidenced by the direct input by the children in the critique and the resulting incorporation of those nominated key ‘must-have’ elements. The collaboration with the families and other specialist educators has produced key themes and principles with the potential for a broad application in guiding the incorporation of the informal and ‘untamed’ natural elements within a challenging play experience. Essentially the considered design process has empowered the children and the importance of their relationships in families and the broader community.

Stephanie is a natural communicator. Her innovative thinking and enthusiasm makes it easy for her to communicate her ideas to others, especially through her outstanding abilities in graphic design. In addition to her work here at Adelaide City Council, Stephanie has also been a positive advocate in her support for AILA and its bid to increase awareness of the importance of landscape architecture and raising the profile of the profession as a whole. This is demonstrated by her enthusiastic approach in a leading role as secretary of SAILA Fresh. Part of her work with SAILA Fresh sees her engaging with and educating students and new graduates, as well as networking with fellow graduates.